Top 100 Melville's Quotes
#2. There was nothing normal about the divine twin sproutings that formed Rachel Melville's magically springy chest. Almost involuntarily Ronnie found himself nodding like an obedient puppy.
Jamie Holoran
#3. We do not know whether Melville's work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.
Terry Eagleton
#4. Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#5. Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
Herman Melville
#6. The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.
Herman Melville
#7. There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
Herman Melville
#8. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Herman Melville
#10. It's the honest point of view of an artist: You have to please.I'd like viewers to come away from my films unsure whether they've understood them. I want to leave them wondering.
Jean-Pierre Melville
#11. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
Herman Melville
#12. You would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without further delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody's knowing the difference if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn't the only one entitled to be a skipper.
Richard Armour
#13. Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?
Herman Melville
#14. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Herman Melville
#15. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.
Dai Sijie
#17. Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.
Herman Melville
#18. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
Herman Melville
#19. For few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action
Herman Melville
#20. I would be as free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.
Herman Melville
#21. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
Herman Melville
#22. Of erections how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
Herman Melville
#23. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity.
Herman Melville
#24. Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!
Herman Melville
#25. When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
Herman Melville
#26. There is a delicacy in it equalled only by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk.
Herman Melville
#27. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Herman Melville
#28. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Herman Melville
#29. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he's bound to hell.
Herman Melville
#30. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
Herman Melville
#31. When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Herman Melville
#32. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
Herman Melville
#33. All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets' forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth's sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.
Herman Melville
#35. Speaking of bones recalls an ugly custom of theirs, now obsolete - that of making fish-hooks and gimlets out of those of their enemies. This beats the Scandinavians turning people's skulls into cups and saucers. But
Herman Melville
#36. Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.
Herman Melville
#37. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.
Herman Melville
#38. A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
Herman Melville
#39. There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable.
Herman Melville
#40. This looks a good team on paper, let's see how it looks on grass.
Nigel Melville
#41. I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical,
Herman Melville
#42. Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales.
Herman Melville
#43. I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself
Herman Melville
#44. [ ... ] and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
Herman Melville
#45. And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.
Herman Melville
#46. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.
Herman Melville
#48. It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
Herman Melville
#49. Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM
that's bad
Herman Melville
#50. But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It's not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.
Robert Stone
#51. You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
#52. War yet shall be, but warriors are now operatives; war's made less grand than peace.
Herman Melville
#53. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.
Jess Walter
#54. Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
Herman Melville
#55. Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.
Herman Melville
#56. The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
Herman Melville
#57. Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
Herman Melville
#58. Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale ... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
Herman Melville
#59. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles
Herman Melville
#60. That's the word, Turkey," said I - "that's it." "Oh, prefer? oh yes - queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer - " "Turkey," interrupted I, "you will please withdraw." "Oh certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should.
Herman Melville
#61. Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.
Herman Melville
#62. Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
Herman Melville
#63. And very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
Herman Melville
#64. Whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed
Herman Melville
#65. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.
Herman Melville
#67. Everyone knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly.
Herman Melville
#68. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.
Herman Melville
#69. Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat
planet Earth
could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
#70. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.
Herman Melville
#71. Command the murderous chalices ... Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow
Death to Moby Dick!
Herman Melville
#72. What could be more full of meaning? - for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest come in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.
Herman Melville
#73. Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake.
Herman Melville
#74. To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.
Herman Melville
#75. It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.
Melville Davisson Post
#77. Confusion is not a bad thing. It's not doubt that makes a man mad. It's certainty.
Pauline Melville
#79. Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh,
Herman Melville
#80. It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.
Herman Melville
#81. For I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool ...
Herman Melville
#82. Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores;let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God's right to come.
Herman Melville
#83. Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.
Herman Melville
#84. Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-"
"It's Herman Melville.
Lemony Snicket
#85. There is no solitude greater than the samurai's, unless perhaps it be that of a tiger in the jungle.
Jean-Pierre Melville
#86. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business.
Herman Melville
#87. Nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer - queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the
Herman Melville
#88. There's something ever egotistical in mountain tops and towers, and all things grand and lofty.
Herman Melville
#89. Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
Herman Melville
#90. s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
Herman Melville
#91. 5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR What's that I saw - lightning? Yes. SPANISH SAILOR No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
Herman Melville
#92. might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword,
Herman Melville
#93. Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts.
Herman Melville
#94. Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Florence King
#95. Thus mysterious divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one Bay to it; seems heart-beating heart of earth.
Herman Melville
#96. Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left - that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
Herman Melville
#97. There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.
Herman Melville
#98. In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
Herman Melville
#99. His dinner is ready. Won't he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?"
"Lives without dining," said I, and closed his eyes.
"Eh! - He's asleep, aint he?"
"With kings and counselors," murmured I.
Herman Melville
#100. He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.
Herman Melville
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